Tag "China"

Some wetlands perform better under pressure.
A new study revealed that when faced with sea-level rise, coastal wetlands respond by burying even more carbon in their soils.
Coastal wetlands, which include marshes, mangroves and seagrasses, already store carbon more efficiently than any other natural ecosystem, including forests.
To get a global picture, scientists from Australia, China, South Africa and the U.S. pooled data from 345 wetland sites on six continents.
And the higher the waters rise, the more underwater storage space exists for the carbon to get buried.
North America and Europe faced the most sea-level rise over the past 6,000 years.
The steady march of climate change is exposing even wetlands farther south to accelerated sea-level rise.
If those wetlands doubled their carbon sequestration — as other wetlands in the study did in response to sea-level rise — they could sequester another 5 million tons of atmospheric carbon every year. “Preservation of coastal wetlands is critical if they are to play a role in sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change,” Rogers said.
One thing is certain: With climate change ramping up, wetlands can protect people in more ways than one, if given enough breathing room.

By Daisy Dunne Methane emissions from coal mining in China have risen despite stricter government regulations that aimed to curb the greenhouse gas, satellite data shows.
The findings show how satellites can be used to pinpoint greenhouse gas emissions “from misbehaving industries that nobody may have suspected,” the lead author told Carbon Brief.
Globally, the largest driver of human-caused methane emissions is agriculture—particularly livestock and rice production.
He told Carbon Brief: “Coal forms underground over long geological time scales and methane is often produced in the coal seams during this process.
Source: Miller et al. (2019) Since 2007, global methane emissions have been increasing at an annual rate of between 5m and 8m tonnes a year, the study says.
This comparison shows that “China’s emissions have been increasing at the same rate as during earlier years, in spite of the government’s coal mining regulations”, Miller says.
One estimate—from the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR; black line on chart)—found China’s methane emissions to be even higher from 2010 to 2012.
(China is a “non-Annex I” country and so not required to report its greenhouse gas emissions to the UNFCCC on an annual basis.)
Detecting Cow Fields The modeling technique also allowed researchers to decide whether methane detected by the satellite had originated from a coal mine, a rice paddy, a cow field or a natural source, such as a wetland, Miller said.
The results suggest that coal mining was the main driver of the rise in methane emissions in China from 2011-15, Miller said: “We saw the largest increases in methane emissions from regions with a lot of coal production and from regions where the coal seams are known to have large amounts of trapped gas.

In the first half of 2018 Chinese automakers built 400,000 electric cars, over half the global total and twice as many EVs as the year before.
EVs, the theory goes, could change all of that.
China, which grants certain EV subsidies only to cars with batteries produced domestically, is the world’s largest manufacturer of automotive lithium-ion batteries and home to seven of the 13 biggest battery makers.
It’s easy to imagine Chinese marques pushing their EV capacity onto the global market, and their automobiles flooding the highways of Europe and North America.
One notable example is Volkswagen, which has both stated its intention to essentially abandon efforts to further develop automotive gasoline and diesel engines after 2026, and to turn its focus to electrics.
Other German brands are thinking the same.
Which brings up a major barrier for the Chinese carmakers looking abroad: the brand equity of the established global competition.
“We already know that Chinese consumers often prefer the foreign brand to the domestic brand,” says MacDuffie.
As the focus of value in a given car shifts from gasoline engines to batteries, some of that value will migrate away from the OEMs, who make engines themselves, to third-party battery producers.
What looks more certain is that China will be a major player in a future global car market dominated by EVs, regardless of the success of its automotive brands.

Vulnerable countries are backing governance reform at the Green Climate Fund, while emerging economies resist efforts to impose conditions on finance Developing countries are split over whether the UN’s flagship climate fund needs a voting system to break deadlock on policy and project decisions.
At present, all 24 members of the Green Climate Fund board have effective veto power.
The US used this in October to block a Chinese bid for a green development loan.
Several policy issues have been repeatedly deferred due to lack of consensus.
As the fund prepares to solicit a fresh round of contributions, a long-running debate flared anew at a board meeting in Songdo, South Korea on Tuesday.
Representatives of vulnerable communities joined rich world voices in calling for governance reform, to make money flow faster.
“In this context, the board has the responsibility to apply the most efficient decision-making procedures possible.
Decision-making should not become a barrier to the delivery of climate finance, which hurts not only the fund and its reputation, but more importantly the fund’s recipients and vulnerable countries the most.” US-China trade war spills into Green Climate Fund Saudi Arabia’s representative railed against any kind of voting system, arguing it would only weaken the developing world’s hand.
“The voting system will do nothing but put you in an inferior position,” Ayman Shasly told his peers.
“These governance flaws, they need to be addressed,” he said.

(Bloomberg) — Saudi Arabia reaffirmed its interest in the Chinese market with a deal to build a $10 billion refining and petrochemicals complex as it vies for crude-oil customers with fellow OPEC members and Russia.
Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco, agreed to set up a joint venture with two Chinese companies to develop the facility in Liaoning province, according to a statement Friday.
Saudi Arabia is investing in energy assets across Asia, the world’s biggest oil-consuming region, as it battles for market share.
The kingdom will supply as much as 70 percent of the crude needed by the new complex, which will include a 300,000-barrel-a-day refinery, an ethylene cracker and a paraxylene unit, the statement shows.
The deal, signed while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is in Beijing, follows recent Saudi pledges to fund projects in India and Pakistan, as well as agreements to invest in South Korea’s Hyundai Oilbank Co. and a petrochemical complex in Malaysia.
The slew of Asian partnerships formed by state-run Aramco comes as Saudi Arabia plays catch-up with Russia, which has topped the kingdom in oil sales to China in the past couple of years.
The Saudis will team up with China North Industries Group Corp., or Norinco, and Panjin Sincen to form an entity called Huajin Aramco Petrochemical Co., according to Friday’s statement.
By the end of 2019, a “three-party marketing JV” is expected to be formed between the Saudi company, North Huajin and Liaoning Transportation Construction Investment Group Co. to develop a filling-stations network, it said.
An initial framework agreement for the Liaoning refinery was signed during Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz’s visit to Beijing in 2017.
On Friday, Aramco said it had now signed memorandums of understanding to expand its downstream presence in Zhejiang, including taking a 9 percent stake in the Zhoushan complex.

The monument protects 10,000 square miles of ocean from any commercial fishing or other extraction.
By the year 2050, it is expected that oceanic pH levels will be lower than they have been in the past 20 million years (Turley et al. 2006).
Every year, healthy corals and fish populations release billions of larvae into the ocean around Rose Atoll that replenish coral reefs and fish on the other islands of American Samoa.
And, every year since 2009, American Samoans on other inhabited islands over 80 miles away have continued to fish and collect marine life to sustain themselves.
This would not have been possible without the protection of Rose Atoll and repopulation of marine life.
What they are finding is that Rose Atoll, with no fishing or other extraction, is more stable and healthy than other islands where fishing and extraction are rampant.
Scientists think that this kind of protected environment with no extraction will be more resilient to the ill effects of climate change.
That, in reality, may ultimately depend on how severe the change is and how slowly and gently it arrives.
In the meantime, the world needs protected places like Rose Atoll and Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monuments to serve as natural benchmarks that show us how much things are really shifting in the rest of the ocean.
Reviewing the impact of increased atmospheric CO2 on oceanic pH and the marine ecosystem.

China has said it will not approve wind and solar power projects unless they can compete with coal power prices.
Beijing pulled the plug on support for large solar projects, which had been receiving a per kWh payment, in late May.
That news came immediately after the country’s largest solar industry event and caught everyone by surprise.
Officials are understood to have been frustrated at seeing Chinese suppliers and engineering firms building solar projects overseas that delivered electricity at prices far below what was available back home.
The country also has its own issues with grid logjams.
In 2017 12% of wind generation and 6% of solar was curtailed.
Technical specifications will ensure that the highest standards are met on that front.
In the past, provincial authorities have spent heavily to bankroll uncompetitive solar manufacturers.
Thursday’s announcement warned that any attempt to use project subsidies to invest in “local factories” or to make the use of locally made components a condition of the subsidy.
Full story here h/t to The GWPF From The Daily Caller 12:01 PM 12/31/2018 | Energy Michael Bastasch | Energy Editor 2018 saw a global revolt against policies aimed at fighting global warming Australia, Canada, France and the U.S. have all seen push back against global warming policies That included weeks of riots in France against planned carbon tax increases Despite increasingly…

Last month’s UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland set (most of) the technical rules of the Paris Agreement, but showed little sign of renewed ambition.
He called on governments to ramp up their commitments – known in UN-speak as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – to the Paris pact.
Nobody wants to go it alone, says David Waskow, senior climate policy expert at the World Resources Institute: “Countries like the EU, China and India, as well as others, will be looking to see how to join hands to take this leap together.” Bolsonaro, Paris and 1.5C: a guide to our top stories of 2018 China, the number one source of greenhouse gases, is non-committal on the world stage, but is mulling increased ambition in domestic policy circles.
President Donald Trump has vowed to quit the Paris deal, making any updated US contribution before 2020 vanishingly unlikely.
We will not accept just any deal at #COP24.
pic.twitter.com/AqDPeATNBt — Miguel Arias Cañete (@MAC_europa) December 14, 2018 One of the key actors behind that statement, EU climate chief Miguel Arias Cañete, is also pushing for bolder climate action at home.
“The new targets would de facto mean that the European Union would be in a position to raise the level of ambition of the NDC and increase its emissions reduction target from the current 40% to slightly over 45% by 2030,” Arias Cañete said in June.
Jahan Chowdury, director of NDC Partnership, told CHN that Vietnam, the Philippines, Jamaica, Honduras, the Seychelles, Marshall Islands, Rwanda, Guatemala, Mongolia and São Tomé and Príncipe have all expressed an intention to up their NDCs by 2020.
Another 15 countries are in conversation with NDC Partnership, Chowdury said.
However many of his policies threaten the world’s biggest rainforest and even before he was sworn in the country backed out of hosting 2019’s UN climate summit.

The IEA’s Coal 2018 report finds that global coal demand grew by 1 percent in 2017 after two years of decline.
In other words, global coal demand is growing, but is still below “peak” levels seen in 2014.
This year’s six-year forecast is the first to project a small decline in global coal demand by 2021—suggesting IEA is moving away from forecasting ongoing growth in demand. ‘Two Europes’ The projected plateau and slow decline of global demand in the coming years is partly the result of efforts to move away from coal in western Europe and North America, the authors say.
Differences in coal phase-out policy in countries across Europe.
Across the EU, coal consumption declined by 1.1 percent to 627m tonnes in 2017.
The report projects that, in the EU, coal demand will drop 2.5 percent per year, from 325m tonnes of coal equivalent (mtce) in 2017 to 280 mtce in 2023.
This rise was largely fueled by an increase in coal-fired power generation, the report says.
These measures, along with China’s commitment to investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, led the IEA to project an overall decline in demand in China—despite the growth seen in 2017.
This year, the IEA has once again cut its forecast for coal demand growth in India.

Government subsidies for electric vehicles and solar panels are an important tool to help accelerate a clean energy economy.
However, a top White House economic advisor said on Monday that the Trump administration is looking to end such federal incentives, Reuters reported.
His comments echoed President Donald Trump’s tweet last week that threatened to cut all subsidies for GM, including ones for electric vehicles, in order to punish the automaker.
General Motors made a big China bet years ago when they built plants there (and in Mexico) -… https://t.co/0U7lwZ3pfy — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 1543345539.0 When asked for a timeline, Kudlow added: “It’s just all going to end in the near future.
I don’t know whether it will end in 2020 or 2021.”
The federal government currently offers $7,500 in tax credits for purchases of new electric vehicles under a 2009 federal law.
The only U.S. carmaker to hit this threshold is Elon Musk’s Tesla, although GM is said to be close to losing this credit.
This means the timeline suggested by Kudlow wouldn’t really hurt GM since their tax credits could soon phase out anyway, as Electrek pointed out.
Kudlow did not provide exact details on how the White House would eliminate the tax credits, as it would require an act of Congress.
However, federal subsidies for the renewable energy sector have declined significantly from about $15.5 billion in 2013 to $6.7 billion in 2016, according an April analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

About

Finding a single source of news on niche topics can be time consuming – until now. The ContentQube Network uses “smart” technology to curate content trending on social media and search based on keywords and categories. Our content discovery engine helps readers stay updated on the latest trends, and introduces them to new publishers daily. We are a referrer to some of the biggest names in the business.

Disclaimer: All the content aggregated is for informational purposes only. The content is owned by the third parties sourced within each article, unless otherwise noted. Attribution and links to the original source are included in each article. OneQube is not responsible for the accuracy of the aforementioned content. If you are the publisher of any of this content and are not interested in the referral traffic, contact us and we will remove the article within 24 hours.